A specter haunts the fast-aging “New American Century”: the possibility of a future Beijing-Moscow-Berlin strategic trade and commercial alliance. Let’s call it the BMB.

Its likelihood is being seriously discussed at the highest levels in Beijing and Moscow, and viewed with interest in Berlin, New Delhi, and Tehran. But don’t mention it inside Washington’s Beltway or at NATO headquarters in Brussels. There, the star of the show today and tomorrow is the new Osama bin Laden: Caliph Ibrahim, aka Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the elusive, self-appointed beheading prophet of a new mini-state and movement that has provided an acronym feast — ISIS/ISIL/IS — for hysterics in Washington and elsewhere.

No matter how often Washington remixes its Global War on Terror, however, the tectonic plates of Eurasian geopolitics continue to shift, and they’re not going to stop just because American elites refuse to accept that their historically brief “unipolar moment” is on the wane. For them, the closing of the era of “full spectrum dominance,” as the Pentagon likes to call it, is inconceivable. After all, the necessity for the indispensable nation to control all space — military, economic, cultural, cyber, and outer — is little short of a religious doctrine. Exceptionalist missionaries don’t do equality. At best, they do “coalitions of the willing” like the one crammed with “over 40 countries” assembled to fight ISIS/ISIL/IS and either applauding (and plotting) from the sidelines or sending the odd plane or two toward Iraq or Syria.

NATO, which unlike some of its members won’t officially fight Jihadistan, remains a top-down outfit controlled by Washington. It’s never fully bothered to take in the European Union (EU) or considered allowing Russia to “feel” European. As for the Caliph, he’s just a minor diversion. A postmodern cynic might even contend that he was an emissary sent onto the global playing field by China and Russia to take the eye of the planet’s hyperpower off the ball.

Observations on the Progressive Nature of the Soviet Union and its Inheritance by the Russian Federation

It is clear that much of the animus exhibited by the Western media towards increasing Russian assertion of its own national interests stems from perceptions of the Russian Federation created during the era of the Soviet Union. The late President Reagan’s reference to it as “the Evil Empire” sums up the received wisdom of “responsible opinion” on the former Union. In the popular mind, the image of the Soviets was an amalgam of exaggerated negative features. Every error and excess from the October Revolution through the Stalin era and on into the “era of stagnation” of Brezhnev became frozen in place. The West projected the past unchanged through the present and into the future, adding any further problems on the way.

This self-serving cartoon-villain remains firmly in place. After the collapse of the Soviet Union Yeltsin’s cabal offered Western elites slavish devotion to Western political and financial interests. The Western media falsely portray every step by Vladimir Putin away from that as some sort of recreation of Soviet “expansionism.” Policy-makers use the hysteria so created to forestall any serious discussion of exactly what is going on in Russian international relations and domestic policy. This allows the most brutal and reactionary factions in the West to carry the day. The cost of this brutality is becoming increasing untenable, and in dire need of change.

Clearly a necessary precondition of any informed, intelligent discussion of Russia’s role in international relations is a redress this willful distortion of the nature of the Soviet Union. Any objective reading of world history, from the end of the Great War to the present, will make clear the progressive nature of the Soviet Union. Further, it will suggest that the Russian Federation continues to act on this legacy – in part, because Western reactions force this role upon it, willingly or not.